The Zionist with a care for skin

Just over 20 years ago when 17 year-old Siona Shecter got the regulation letter telling her that the time had come for her to commit the next two years of her life to serving in the Israeli army, it opened a new chapter in her life that prepared her for life in Jamaica today and the rigours of starting a beauty product line that she plans to launch next week.

According to Shecter, she’s working with Pulse Entertainment Group boss Kingsley Cooper to introduce her Ahava Skin Care and Spa products to the region at Caribbean Fashion Week.

For her, though, it’s more than work. She sees it as fulfilling her destiny.

“I am very mystical,” Shecter tells all woman. “I don’t believe things happen by chance. The universe has a plan for me.”

It was that belief, no doubt, that led to Shecter feeling honoured when she was drafted.

“Israelis are very army oriented,” she explains, “so although it was a bit scary I was proud to be able to serve my country in this way. It makes you feel as if you are part of the Jewish family of the world. If war happens, then you are able to defend your country.”

Before she was accepted in the army, Shecter says she was subjected to a thorough background check.

“They have to make sure that you are Jewish,” she explains. “This is done through the maternal line; that is, your mother has to be Jewish. Then they check your health and also your family line to make sure that you won’t be a security risk and so on.”

The training, she remembers, was tough. “(It) is just as rigorous as the men’s,” she says, while demonstrating how she was taught to lie on the ground and use her Uzi.

After a couple of months, she says, she and a few other women were selected to do a range of tests, after which she was assigned to work in the Ministry of Defence.

“The aptitude tests determined your strengths and where in the army you would be best suited to serve,” she explains. “I became the office manager in the finance division of the Ministry of Defence.”

According to Shecter, her two years in the army equipped her with survival skills that she continues to use daily.

“I am very alert when it comes to security, because of my training. I constantly monitor my surroundings,” she says. “A lot of crisis came every day, so I learnt crisis management.”

The training comes in handy, especially when she returns to Israel (at least twice per year for business and professional reasons).

“The risk of death is always present in Israel,” Shecter explains. “We have many enemies, and so many suicidal groups and terrorists. You could be sitting in a café and a suicide bomber comes in and you die, so you have to be alert.”

Now that she’s out of the army, Shecter’s quite happy with the total freedom she enjoys to travel, unlike her army days when, because of her posting, she was restricted.

“My position in the Defence Ministry at the time gave me access to secretive information, so the army did not want me to go to certain countries,” she tells all woman. “For seven to 10 years I could not go to these places because there was the risk that I could be captured and be forced to reveal army secrets.”

Shecter says she was born in Romania, but her family moved to Israel while she was a baby.

“My father was the head of surgery for a leading hospital in Bucharest (and) my mother was an opera singer,” she says.

“In the early 1960s, the head of the Israeli Mossad, Isar Harel, went to Romania to persuade intellectual Jews to go back to Israel. He met my father and asked him to come back.

“My father applied for permission to leave Romania and when the Romanians found out what he was doing they fired him. The authorities told him that he had to pay US$1,000 for each person in his family. It was three of us, but my father did not have it,” she says. “Luckily, I had an aunt in the US who borrowed the money and loaned him, so we went to Israel. Then my dad got a job similar to the one that he had had in Romania.”

Shecter, who explains that her first name, Siona, is the “feminine form of Zion, the Holy Land”, pursued her degree in education and a second degree in communications at Tel Aviv University after leaving the army.

Ten years later, in 1997, she also completed a two-year course in marketing, project administration and public relations.

“For most of my career after the army I have been involved in sales and marketing,” she explains.

She lists the Musayev Co (the second largest Israeli provider of precious stones) and Clal Pharm (one of the most luxurious cosmetic chain stores in Israel) among the places that she has worked.

Eventually, though, she visited Jamaica and decided to stay for a while after taking a job with the Sandals chain of hotels.

She credits Horace Peterkin, general manager of Sandals Montego Bay, as being one of the persons who helped her to understand some of Jamaica’s culture.

“He was very understanding and helped me to adjust,” she says.

Peterkin describes Shecter as very efficient and a good thinker, albeit with some eccentricity.

“I have known her for three years, when she joined Sandals Montego Bay as a junior assistant manager,” he tells all woman. “She helped to reorganise the administrative function of the Maintenance Department. She revamped the system and made it a lot more efficient.”

Peterkin also remembers that Shecter “had a lot of ideas, is eccentric, a good thinker and extremely passionate. If she believes in something, she bites into it like a pit bull”.

But the Israeli is also very emotional, he observes. “She might cry about something today and then bounce back with ideas to solve it tomorrow. She is not your typical employee, as she will challenge you at times, but she is very bright.”

Aulus Maddan, Shecter’s accountant, agrees.

“She is unlike everybody. She is aggressive and eccentric, as well as emotional. But she takes her business very seriously,” says Maddan.

Shecter eventually left Sandals a year ago, apparently to give more attention to her Ahava Skin Care and Spa products which, she says, are Green Globe certified.

The products, she says, are ideal for women in the Caribbean who sometimes have problems with oily skin.

“My two-and-a-half years of market testing have shown that oily skin is a problem in the tropics,” says Shecter. “Our products have a lot of minerals straight from the Dead Sea in Israel that are ideal for dealing with that.”

She is excited about the launch at which the Israeli ambassador to the Caribbean Yoav Bar-on will be the guest speaker.

“It will just be great,” she says.

But even amidst her excitement, Shecter is firm in her realisation that she is being directed by a superior being.

“I am Zionist,” she says. “It is in God’s hands, as God goes before me.”